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right. Ian was a fine young stallion, and he was displaying the fact with startling effect. Alinor's first impulse was to laugh and make a bawdy jest. A flickering glance at Ian's face checked her. He was certainly well aware of the condition he was in, but he did not think it was funny. Briefly, Alinor was hurt. During the many years she had bathed high-born visitors to her keep, the reaction Ian was having occurred with other men once in a while. Sometimes it was deliberately produced by men who thought Alinor had to be dissatisfied with her husband because he was so much older than she. They had underestimated Simon, and from Alinor had received such icy courtesy that the deliberate provocation did not occur a second time. With those in whom it was an innocent accident engendered by too long a period of continence or an inadvertent physical contact, it was best to make a jest, laugh, and forget. |
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It was usually best, but Alinor somehow knew she must not laugh at Ian's stony-faced refusal to acknowledge his condition. She rose from her knees and stepped back, and for the first time the full impact of his beauty hit her. The black curls that usually tumbled silkily over his forehead were lank and flattened, but that did nothing to reduce the luminous quality of his large, dark eyes. The nose was fine, the lips both sensitive and sensuous. He was very tall for a man, head and shoulders both topped Alinor, and he was surprisingly hairlessjust a shadow of dark down at the end of his breastbone and a narrow line from the navel to the pubic bush. His skin was very dark, very smooth, where it was not bleached and knotted by scars of battle. |
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In the year that Simon had been ill, Alinor was too tired and too worried to think of herself as a woman. After his death, the fatigue and worry had only intensified. Now, without warning, she became aware of her long starvation. The blood rushed from her face to her loins. She put a hand on the tub to steady herself, and thanked God that Ian was staring past her into nothing. |
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